Traces of Texas Slavery

Nancy Bercaw is a curator of the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Bercaw received her bachelor’s degree in history from Oberlin College and her master’s and doctoral degrees in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. Additionally, Bercaw is the author of Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of the Household in the Mississippi Delta, 1861–1875.  She edited Gender and the Southern Body Politic and co-edited the Gender volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

Mary Elliott  is a Museum Specialist at the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. She helped research, conceptualize and design the “Slavery and Freedom” inaugural exhibition. She contributed to the exhibition script, consulted with expert scholars, and identified and secured collection donations including the antebellum slave cabin that will be featured in the museum. A graduate of Howard University and the Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law, her personal research focuses on African Americans from antebellum slavery through the Jim Crow Era, with a specific concentration on migration and community development.

Maria Franklin is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Anthropology and the Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. As a historical archeologist, she has led investigations at plantations and "freedom colonies" in central Texas. Dr. Franklin has also served as a Senior Research Fellow with the Department of Archaeological Research at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Virginia.

Andrew Torget is a historian of nineteenth-century North America at the University of North Texas, where he also runs a digital humanities lab. Dr. Torget developed the Texas Slavery Project as an experiment in how visualization methods might provide new insights into his research on the westward expansion of the American South. His most recent book is Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850, tells the story of how global economic shifts transformed northern Mexico into the American Southwest. Seeds of Empire has won ten book prizes and awards.